The Era of Democratised Hardware Is Here

In high school I spent an unreasonable number of nights staring at a hex editor. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was the big one. I’d open the game files, change a value, load the game and see what broke. Slowly I’d work out which bytes did what, and once I had something worth sharing I’d package it up and hand it out to anyone who wanted it.

That led to memory editing, then DLL hooks. You inject your own code into a running game, intercept the functions it calls and make it do things the developers never planned for. I made mods and cheats, and some of them got around the checks that were supposed to stop people like me. It was a lot of fun.

It was also slow. You’d lose a whole weekend chasing an address that turned out to be the wrong one. A patch would come out and every offset you’d found would move. Accounts got banned. Forum threads went dead with your exact question sitting unanswered at the bottom. For every mod I released there were plenty of experiments that went nowhere.

Now AI makes this stuff ridiculously fast, as long as you know what you’re doing. A model doesn’t know what normal traffic looks like on your network, or which of three plausible theories deserves the first test. You still need to know how to capture packets, read a hex dump and notice when the model has confidently invented a length field that doesn’t exist. It’ll happily tell you a byte is a checksum when it’s a counter.

But I can hand Claude a packet capture and a list of what I clicked, and have a working theory about the framing before my coffee’s cold. When the theory’s wrong I find out straight away, because it’s already written a little test client to check. Guess, test, swear, guess again. As a teenager that loop took me days, and now it takes minutes.

Our house has ducted air conditioning from iZone. Earlier this year I built a CLI to control it by working out how the bridge on our network takes commands. That’s since grown into a Raspberry Pi that runs the zones itself, adjusting temperatures and settings room by room on its own logic. Nobody in the house opens the iZone app anymore. iZone never documented any of it for end users.

Then there’s the Helix Stadium XL. Last Christmas I dug into how the official editor talks to the unit over Wi-Fi, which turned out to be OSC messages wrapped in a ZeroMQ handshake. Skip the handshake and the Stadium drops your connection without a word.

Once I had that sorted, I built HELYON, a free mobile editor for the Stadium. Line 6’s own editor is still a desktop app for macOS and Windows. HELYON has over 100 users now and the number keeps going up.

The same work led to a NAM-to-Proxy converter, which I’m still working on.

I’ve done the same with my Samsung Frame TV and my Galaxy Watch. Both now do things Samsung never offered me.

And there’s the Galaxy S21 that had been rotting in a drawer. Samsung pushed what looks like its last update in January with the January 2026 security patch, and the phone has dropped off Samsung’s update schedules. Its final major Android upgrade was Android 15 back in May 2025. As far as Samsung’s concerned, it’s finished. I jailbroke it and it’s useful again.

I did the same to an old iPhone 12 Pro Max. It’s on iOS 17 and jailbroken, so it runs whatever I put on it instead of whatever Apple approved for the App Store. It had been sitting around doing nothing, and now it’s back in use.

There’s an enormous pile of perfectly good hardware sitting in drawers like those two phones. The chips still work and so do the screens. The manufacturer would rather you bought a new one. Now that reverse engineering is this cheap, a lot of it can come back out of the drawer.

It matters for the hardware you’re using right now too. We live in a hostile hardware environment. You pay for a device, and then the company that made it keeps deciding what you’re allowed to do with it.

Samsung is a good example because I own so much of its stuff. With One UI 8 last year, the OEM Unlocking toggle disappeared from Galaxy phones. US models had been locked for years, but the rest of the world could still unlock the bootloader. On phones running One UI 8, that option is gone for everyone.

Samsung’s TVs are worse. Its own privacy policy says its smart TVs collect information about what you watch using automatic content recognition, which samples what’s on your screen and matches it against a database of shows and ads. Samsung agreed to stop doing it without explicit consent in Texas after the state’s attorney general sued. Everywhere else, you have to find the setting and turn it off yourself.

Google started enforcing developer verification on 30 September in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand. Certified Android phones there now block apps from unverified developers by default, and the global rollout is planned for 2027. If you want to install something Google hasn’t blessed, you turn on a developer setting and wait 24 hours. Being able to install whatever you wanted used to be the main reason to pick Android over an iPhone.

None of this is going to reverse itself, because every one of these companies makes more money the less control you have. I’m not waiting for a regulator to sort it out either.

Locking a device down used to be enough to stop almost everyone, because the people who could get around it were a small group with a lot of patience and free time. That group is a lot bigger now. A developer with a decent model, a packet capture and a free weekend can do what used to take a dedicated forum months to figure out.

I’m not pretending everyone’s suddenly a hardware hacker. You still need to understand what you’re looking at, and AI makes a confident mess very quickly if you don’t. But if you’ve got the fundamentals, the hardware you own is a lot more yours than it was a couple of years ago.

As a teenager I’d sit in front of a hex editor for a whole weekend waiting for one value to change. Now I can get a working client for a protocol nobody documented in an afternoon, and I’ve got my eye on a few more devices around the house.